High Tech / Software Development

High tech manufacturing and software development firms have a highly unique security challenge. Like companies in any vertical industry, these firms experience similar difficulty keeping most of their systems patched in a timely manner. While the struggle to patch desktops, clients, back office systems, and email servers is common across all industries, the development labs in high tech manufacturing and software development companies create an entirely different set of problems for system administrators and IT security professionals.

The production and QA labs inside high tech manufacturing and software development companies could be considered the equivalent of the "production floor" inside of a traditional (e.g. automotive, aerospace, etc.) manufacturer. Software developers typically require a large inventory of systems at their disposal in order to build new applications and maintain different versions and revisions. Testing and quality assurance labs also require a significant number of systems. If this high tech production floor should experience a significant outage due to a security event, the effect is equivalent to taking an entire factory offline in the traditional manufacturing world.

The biggest risk posed by the test and development labs of high tech manufacturers and software developers is network-based attack. While patching is considered the best method of software vulnerability remediation, this is not an option for most high-tech manufacturing companies. Because older software versions are a required piece of their development and testing equation. Software must often be tested for compatibility with older (i.e. unpatched) versions of software that must remain intact and therefore, vulnerable.

Most technology manufacturers and software developers have begun to rely heavily upon virtualized environments in order to simplify their system inventory management and utility. The primary benefit of virtualization is that these companies can now bring systems up or take them down, on demand, without having to completely provision a new system on a hardware platform. The downside is that unpatched systems featuring a greater level of vulnerability are the ones brought online.

Blue Lane offers the first solution to instantly protect critical servers from known application-specific vulnerabilities with zero operational risk. Blue Lane's solution quickly shields unpatched servers with zero footprint, zero downtime, and zero tuning, and provides the only recourse in an environment where the vendor patch simply cannot be applied.